Home Servers, Network Storage and the Case House
by Loyd Case on December 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Here at the Case House, we’re pretty sophisticated home users, as you might imagine. Even if you ignore me, for a moment, there are my two daughters. Elizabeth (now at UCLA) and Emily (who is a sophomore in high school) are both tech savvy users. Elizabeth is best thought of as a power user, particularly when it comes to cell phones and laptops. She’s also a gifted digital photographer and expert Photoshop user (as it applies to photography.)
Emily is more of a power Internet user and gamer. Facebook is always open on her system, as is iTunes. She users her iPod Classic as much for games as for music, and she’s been known to boot up some pretty serious PC games – Titan Quest, Neverwinter Nights 2 and others.
My wife, on the other hand, will tell you she’s not particularly tech savvy. In one sense, she’s right. I had to set up Harmony One universal remote or she would have never figured out the home theater. She still looks to me for basic hardware support, like setting up her work laptop for dual displays whenever she disconnects and reconnects the laptop. In other ways, though, she’s a sophisticated user of tech, building web pages for her company, initiating and managing teleconferencing sites and designing corporate training curricula.
On top of that, we’re all multi-PC users. Elizabeth has both a full featured laptop and netbook. Emily can be found using the communal living room laptop for homework, sometimes more so than the desktop PC in her room.
As for me – I want access to media, music, benchmarking apps, game patches and other useful software from any location in the house. Keeping my PC on 24/7 really isn’t the right answer: network storage is.
What Do You Mean “Network Storage?”
The situation with network storage isn’t as simple as it should be. There exist a spectrum of choices, depending on what you actually need:
- Small, single drive systems that attach to your network and simply become another hard drive to your PC, albeit slower.
- Network attached storage (NAS) devices that offer additional flexibility, including automated backups, USB printer access through the network and some degree of user account control.
- Media savvy NAS boxes that build on basic NAS capability, then add plugin capability. For example, the ReadyNAS from Netgear offers the ability to run a Slimserver plugin, letting you access digital music stored on the server with Logitech SqueezeBox digital media adapters.
- Interesting convergence devices that are both NAS boxes and media servers, like the Mediagate line of hardware, or Western Digital’s WD TV.
- PC based servers. These can range from consumer oriented Windows Home Servers to full on multicore hardware running Windows Server 2003 or one of the many Linux
distros.
- The final solution is cloud storage – something that’s still new to a lot of home users, and exists in multiple implementations and at varying cost structures.
In an ideal world, you’d assess your needs and pick the network storage technology that suits your needs. In the Case House, most of our network storage needs have been ably handled by one of the original ReadyNAS 600 systems, built and sold by Infrant prior to its acquisition by Netgear. The system originally shipped with 1TB of storage (four 250GB drives), set up in RAID 5 mode.
After several years, the oddball paddlewheel cooling fan began to die, so I replaced both the fan and PSU, while simultaneously upgrading the hard drives to four 500GB drives (2TB total, about 1.6TB usable in RAID 5.) The ReadyNAS has since been working fine, humming quietly in the basement lab storage area, giving me no problems and doing its job.
So naturally, I wanted something different.
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Plifzig - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Your daughters appear momentarily when you're ignored. That's a cool trick!Plifzig - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
And maybe I read that second sentence of the article while enjoying a quasi-autistic brain fart, I don't know.That aside, good to see you land here from ET and later HH. I have enjoyed several of your pieces in the past.
Pottervilla - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
I like your writing style, Loyd--many of us geeks can commiserate with the "if it's not broke, add more features" syndrome you describe. :-)I'm assuming an editor will catch the broken link on page 3, but I thought I'd mention it. (I think it's missing quotes around the URL?)
A NAS would be great fun--I've always wanted one--but for $900, the extra drives can continue to live in my comp. I think I want a $1000 Newegg gift certificate for Christmas. :-)
Pottervilla - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Whups, that was page 4.jigglywiggly - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Bleh, I don't like this, why a matx board? There is no expandability for something like a RAID card? ALso it should be a large case for expandability in hard drives, not something so small.Windows Home Server is a joke as well, why even bother something, that is just a home edition. Just run some nice FreeBSD on it, you get:
A: Huge security benefits, and a "fake" active directory configuration, if you know what you are doing with samba. (This translates into most *nix systems)
B: No GUI, why would you want a GUI on a server?
C: Stabability, yes it is more stable.
D: 8.00 Just came out a few days ago, so it's fresh.
If you are running real Windows Server, that's fine, but I frown upon most Windows Server users, because they almost know nothing about the innerness of software, not that it's a requirement, but it means something.
One thing Windows you might want to use Windows for is: Intel RAID, the stupid intel ichXr does not have a storage manager, so the *nixs see each hd as seperate, this is bad, you have to do disgusting software RAID. I am confused why Intel contributes so much to the Linux kernel if they don't have something like this.
Bottom line: I don't like this: No expandability, meh choice of operating system.
realitycheck - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
You seem to completely miss the point of the whole home server idea. Home servers aren't meant for people with IT degrees or network engineering backgrounds, thus putting BSD and CLI usage far far out of reach for the intended target user of home servers.Secondly WHS isn't "just a home edition" of a server. if you take a look under the hood, say by looking at msinfo32 you'd see that WHS is really SBS 2003 in home server clothing "OS Name Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Server 2003 for Small Business Server". its just reconfigured for home server usage. but all the functionality of SBS is still there, or can be added back in, which means you have the power of server 2003, the fastest and most stable OS microsoft has written to date, and the feature set of SBS 2003 for your home and all for a small fee. WHS is a great and very powerful product if youre not afraid to tinker with its interworkings a bit.
nilepez - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Why a gui? Because it's for home users. Some day, *nix will get enough non-CLI fan boys to make a dent in the home market, but so long as attitudes like yours prevail, *nix will remain a irrelevant niche in the home market.As it is, whs is probably too hard to use for most people, but it's better than *nix or Server 2003/2008. More options are not what most people want or need at this time.
MS spends tons of money on usability studies, and you can bet that some of that money goes into WHS.
FYI, I work on unix all day long, and I wish there was a gui on it sometimes. And I've never thought, "this system would be better if it didn't offer a GUI."
jigglywiggly - Friday, December 4, 2009 - link
You have the option to install one from ports if you are using FreeBSD.nilepez - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Why a gui? Because it's for home users. Some day, *nix will get enough non-CLI fan boys to make a dent in the home market, but so long as attitudes like yours prevail, *nix will remain a irrelevant niche in the home market.As it is, whs is probably too hard to use for most people, but it's better than *nix or Server 2003/2008. More options are not what most people want or need at this time.
MS spends tons of money on usability studies, and you can bet that some of that money goes into WHS.
FYI, I work on unix all day long, and I wish there was a gui on it sometimes. And I've never thought, "this system would be better if it didn't offer a GUI."
Exelius - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Agreed on some points; but windows home server has a lot of nice features for home users (media streaming, homegroups, etc.) You can probably get those with FreeBSD, but you'd have to set it up. It's more work than buying a server off the shelf with support.And after having adminned FreeBSD, Linux and Windows boxes for the last few years, the *nix boxes get compromised a lot more than the Windows boxes. Mostly because *nix servers have a reputation for being "secure" so nobody every updates them, and some new Bind exploit comes along and suddenly the box is loaded with proxies and spam relays.
Probably not ideal for a server you want to stick in the basement and forget about it. *nix is not more secure, the security issues are just different. You don't need a root exploit to seriously compromise a system.